NASA. It's the Great American Bureaucracy. The only thing we can all agree on. Even the most cynical, small-government-obsessed libertarians can get behind it. Space is great! Everybody loves NASA.

Yet the space agency is getting ready to prove all of us completely wrong as it sends a rocket off to the Asteroid Belt:

It is an exciting mission that will confirm once and for all if an asteroid near Mars has the potential to bring down the world's economy.

Far-fetched as it may seem, scientists say the 16 Psyche space rock could be worth such an unfathomable amount of money that this outcome is not out of the realms of possibility.

That's because some believe it is packed full of precious metals with a value in excess of $10,000 quadrillion.

That's a lot of money. As the Guardian notes, the introduction of that much raw, valuable resource into the commerce stream "would be large enough to destroy commodity prices and cause the world's economy...to collapse." Which is, you know, a small concern. Not exactly the sort of thing you want happening.

One MIT scientist said the rock could "solve the metal resource problems of humankind for all time." Which is good! We should want that. But we should be aware that it could also lead to global financial collapse and the end of functional society, at least for a little while.

Just something to thing about as NASA's little rocket blasts off into space.